My wife, Charlie (the family border collie), and I left the mountains of Colorado a week ago and have returned to the warmth and comfort of Southern California. It was great to spend some time with family and friends. And I love to ski. But it was time for the vacation to end — time to come back home.

MQA continues to spin their thread of sonic improvements through “origami” and removing “time smear” with high-end equipment manufacturers, audiophile reviewers, and streaming services. Among professional audio engineers and equipment designers, the jury is still out on the merits of MQA. I’ve made my position pretty clear over the past couple of years — they have developed solution to a non problem. There is no need to enhance fidelity beyond high-resolution PCM, FLAC encodes are DRM free and open to everyone and deliver better compression, and virtually all tracks consumed on disc or via streams aren’t high-resolution to start with and therefore can’t possibly benefit from MQA.… Read the full article

Summer has arrived. I gave my final lecture and final exams, turned in all my grades, and attended graduation to send off another crop of audio/media engineers a couple of weeks ago. The class of 2017 was among my favorites and it was great receive a round of applause following the senior crit. I’m quite sure not everyone appreciates the demands I place on them but those that accept and overcome the challenges will undoubtedly find careers in the field. Many others will not but they are prepared for life in other professions.… Read the full article

I’m back from Chicago. The 2017 edition of the AXPONA is behind me and will most likely be the last time I assemble a real high-resolution, surround music system. We were unique in offering a room that provided high-resolution, surround music. While there were other rooms with multichannel playback — including Dolby Atmos systems — they played movies not music. I’ve read a couple of online reports that gave “Best of Show” nods to other surround rooms by authors that didn’t experience our room.… Read the full article